My dear mother-in-law seems to attract chaos. Whatever she is doing something always goes terribly wrong or she has some totally different (ridiculous) expectation on how it should be done. As I have mentioned already too often MIL is coming to stay with us for three months starting in the middle of April. But until today it wasn’t even sure that it would work out.

The problem was all the paperwork for the Visa and of course MIL herself. First of all we needed to get few papers in order to even apply for the Visa. The first was the declaration of obligation from the city hall here in my home town. This declaration basically states that I am inviting my mother-in-law, the reason, the starting date, that we will come up with anything she might do wrong here, that she will return and of course papers from my work place showing that I have the needed financial means to support her stay for those three months. The needed income varies from state to state here in Germany and I also heard it might depend on the person you are speaking to at the town hall, hooray for the great German bureaucracy. This paper was rather easy to get with only a few visits at the town hall but we also needed to get a travel insurance for MIL. This insurance we just ordered online from one of the many Insurance companies in Germany and got it done right away.

Then MIL needed to get certain other certificates from China in order to have all papers ready for the visa. Those papers were the confirmation of relationship between her and my wife, papers proving her monthly retirement money and some other paper I have forgotten. Especially of the paper stating the relationship between her and my wife she needed a verified version and an authorized version (wonder why). But of course here it goes wrong just as expected from my crazy Chinese mother-in-law…she removed the verified paper from the other and sent only one! Yes, she went through all the trouble to take those two papers apart which were even stitched together because she…well even she couldn’t explain, the master of twisting the truth was not able to come up with an excuse. Furthermore she did this whole visa application process already twice before so it was really weird for her to suddenly decide to do things differently. Perhaps there should be a new word in the dictionary for such behavior “Crazy MIL”.

She only did realize her mistake after the embassy called her saying that this paper is missing. However it was already too late to resend it. Throughout the past days my wife tried to call several offices in China in order to fix this mess but they all were not able to help. So it was more surprising today to get the message that MIL got her passport back with the valid Visa. Right now I am not so sure whether to be happy or to be sad about my upcoming three-month madness. It seems that Lina from My Hong Kong husband tried her best to aid me in this endeavour as she offered several times to make MIL’s visit impossible but in the end even she failed. The only bad thing in case the Visa application hadn’t worked out is the money wasted…

So as you can see it is not that easy to get a Visa to Europe or to be more specific to Germany but it is actually mostly only annoying paperwork. Usually it is not even that difficult but this depends of course on the background of both the inviter and the person who wants to come to Germany. Now I am really happy that this whole mess is done for now and the next weeks I will prepare myself mentally for the 16th of April, the MIL arrival day. Perhaps I should start Yoga again or something else to find my inner peace.

What are your experiences with Visa procedures?

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